was a reminder of some
of the worst in our native country. They called it "the bank," and the
story of its terrors to motorists, told us by a Helmsley villager, was
in no wise an exaggeration. It illustrates the risk often attending a
digression into byroads not listed in the road-book, for England is a
country of many hilly sections. I had read only a few days before of the
wreck of a large car in Derbyshire where the driver lost control of his
machine on a gradient of one in three. The car dashed over the
embankment, demolishing many yards of stone wall and coming to rest in a
valley hundreds of feet beneath. And this was only one of several
similar cases. Fortunately, we had only the descent to make. The bank
dropped off the edge of the moorland into a lovely and fertile valley,
where, quite unexpectedly, we came upon Bylands Abbey, the rival of
Rievaulx, but far more fallen into decay. It stood alone in the midst of
the wide valley; no caretaker hindered our steps to its precincts and no
effort had been made to prop its crumbling walls or to stay the green
ruin creeping over it. The fragment of its great eastern window, still
standing, was its most imposing feature and showed that it had been a
church of no mean architectural pretension. The locality, it would seem,
was well supplied with abbeys, for Rievaulx is less than ten miles away,
but we learned that Bylands was founded by monks from the former
brotherhood and also from Furness Abbey in Lancashire. In the good old
days it seems to have been a common thing when the monks became
dissatisfied with the establishment to which they were attached for the
dissenters to start a rival abbey just over the way.

Coxwold is a sleepy village undisturbed by modern progress, its thatched
cottages straggling up the crooked street that leads to the hilltop,
crowned by the hoary church whose tall, massive octagonal tower
dominates the surrounding country. It seems out of all proportion to the
poverty-stricken, ragged-looking little village on the hillside, but
this is not at all an uncommon impression one will have of the churches
in small English towns. Across the road from the church is the old-time
vicarage, reposing in the shade of towering elms, and we found no
difficulty whatever in gaining admission to "Shandy Hall," as it is now
called. We were shown the little room not more than nine feet square
where Sterne, when vicar, wrote his greatest book, "Tristram Shandy."
The